Desert

Echoes of the Wind /  by Nick McOwen

Among the turgid rocks of the Painted Desert at sunrise.

I summited a nearby boulder and stood proudly, surveyed the surroundings. I am no Shackleton or Hillary, but for a moment, it felt as if I had discovered a new world.

It was new to me, at least.

Suddenly, a gust of wind pushed me off balance, as if by otherworldly intervention. I steadied myself and listened as the wind pushed its way through the volcanic stone. The faint whistles and shrieks emerged around me like souls trying fruitlessly to escape hell. Something was announcing who had been and always will be of the land.

I smiled as I steadied myself.

In the Desert: Shooting Cinestille 800T in Daylight (Copy) /  by Nick McOwen

I’ll be honest, I’m late to the party when it comes to shooting CineStill 800T. The repurposed movie stock cut and formatted for still cameras immediately piqued my interest after watching several Willem Verbeeck and Jason Kummerfeldt videos. I bought a few rolls and promptly took photographs of a gas station. The trademark halations were present and I was really excited to see what I could do with this film stock.

However, I had an outing to northern Arizona planned but half a roll of CineStill 800T left in my Nikon FM2. I wanted to know how the film performed in the desert and if it would be worth taking it with me. I decided to ask the all knowing internet clairvoyant that is Google.

Search results… 404 not found.

Unable to find any samples of 800T being used for desert photography (albeit only looking for 20 minutes), I decided to play mad scientist and head out to the desert to shoot some CineStill. I even bought a roll of 120 film just incase I was feeling a little crazy.

Toadstool Hoodoos shot on 35mm CineStill 800T

I decided it would try the film out at the Toadstool Hoodoos, a geological formation about 35 minutes from Page, AZ or about 45 from Kanab, UT.

Being a true man of science, I brought my Fuji X-T30 along with my Portra 800 loaded Rolleiflex to take a comparison photo or two.

The differences are quite drastic. I didn’t edit any of the photos before posting as I wanted to see how everything looked straight out of the camera. For context, I shot the photos around 6:30am, about an hour after sunrise. To me the CineStill looks like it was shot in the middle of the day and, as expected, the cooler film brings forward more of the greens and blues. While the color of the sand looks great to me, the X-T30 did a better job showing the true color at that moment by turning the sand a more golden orange. I only took one photo with Portra because… if you’ve shot 120mm Portra 800 you know why. If not, it’s something near $2.50 a photograph.

Clearly CineStill won’t be capturing that early morning/late afternoon mood that so many photographers seek and I’m not shocked the warmth of the early morning sun didn’t translate onto the film. But at ISO 800, the grain looks great compared to the ruthless renderings of a digital sensor and I even prefer the blue of it’s sky to the blue of the Portra’s sky. In fact, I quite like the muted reds that it captured in the desert as well. It reminds me of some of the old desaturated Kodachrome photos of the 70s and 80s.

So, where Portra typically gives a warm familial hug, CineStill offers the cold and inhospitable handshake of that in-law you disappoint too frequently. I believe the CineStill can be used effectively and if you know what you are trying to achieve it can be a great tool. I certainly plan on taking a few rolls with me whenever I go back to the southwest in the future. But knowing how this film can cool down an image faster than Freddie Jackson sipping a milkshake in a snow storm can, I’ll be very deliberate in it’s application.

I’ll update this post in the future after I’ve taken more photos with CineStill in the desert. Until then, I hope this helps at least one frustrated photographer wondering if it’s worth the costs and development.